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Contradiction and Paradox in Lofi Hip Hop (1)

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Contradiction and Paradox in Lofi Hip Hop (1) Beats to Relax/Study To: Contradiction and Paradox in Lofi Hip Hop (1) Emma Winston Goldsmiths, University of London [email protected] Laurence Saywood Goldsmiths, University of London [email protected] Abstract Lofi hip hop is a musical genre which is distributed and mediated entirely via the internet, and which, to our knowledge, is currently unexamined academically. This article serves as an introductory investigation into the genre, which we hope may inspire further research and perhaps call into question existing trends in the analysis of “internet-born” music genres, which, as Adam Harper (2017) notes, often emphasize the degenerative effects of digital technology. We briefly define lofi hip hop stylistically and aesthetically, before exploring its contradictory relationship with nostalgia. We then consider the genre’s mediation and reception in terms of its participants’ relationship with the material conditions of late capitalism. We conclude that lofi hip hop is characterized by a series of complex paradoxes navigated effortlessly by its listeners, highlighting a shift in everyday reality amongst a generation of young people for whom the social internet is simply an ordinary part of life. KEYWORDS: internet music, lofi hip hop, social media, subculture and scene, music in everyday life Introduction Lofi hip hop, named for its producers’ deliberate introduction of “low fidelity,” analog-style sonic imperfections into their digitally produced tracks, is a musical genre traceable to the mid-2010s which has stylistic roots in 1990s instrumental or IASPM Journal vol.9 no.2 (2019) Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music ISSN 2079-3871 | DOI 10.5429/2079-3871(2019)v9i2.4en | www.iaspmjournal.net Beats to Relax/Study To: Contradiction and Paradox in Lofi Hip Hop 41 experimental hip hop, and which, to our knowledge, currently remains unexamined in academic publications. Lofi hip hop tracks appear to be mediated almost entirely via the internet, with its enthusiasts congregating across multiple online social networking platforms. The genre enjoys particular popularity on the video platform YouTube, where 24/7 livestreams and curated lofi hip hop mixes are broadcast by numerous channels. The purely online distribution YouTube facilitates seems to enable channels from a range of geographical locations to rise to popularity: a sampling of some of the accounts displaying on the first page of an anonymous YouTube search for the term “lofi hip hop” shows that channel ChilledCow (2019) appears to be based in France; College Music (2019) and the bootleg boy (2019) in the United Kingdom; InYourChill (2019), Syros (2019), and Ambition (2019) in the United States of America; Mellowbeat Seeker (2019) in South Korea. The channels we have just listed each have between hundreds of thousands and millions of subscribers; ChilledCow, notably, appears to be the most popular lofi hip hop streaming service on YouTube, and possesses more than three million subscribers, with the bootleg boy close behind at two million subscribers. ChilledCow’s most popular stream, “lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to” (2018), received an estimated 126.4 million views between August 2018 and August 2019 (Socialblade, 2019). In writing this paper, we initially planned to refer to lofi hip hop as a “microgenre”, but abandoned this upon realizing that by these metrics it is far from a niche, underground style of music; we are left to assume that the genre’s disintermediation from the music industry at large, outside of social networking sites, has contributed to its neglect (it is worth noting that we use the term 'genre’ here, despite lofi hip hop’s arguable position as a subgenre of hip hop more broadly, because we believe it to be comparable in significance and popularity to the internet musics discussed in the work of Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth (2017), which are referred to throughout as ‘genres’). This article, therefore, serves as an introductory investigation into lofi hip hop, which we hope may pique interest in the genre. We aim, here, to briefly define lofi hip hop stylistically and aesthetically, before performing a more detailed analysis of a track to explore the genre’s complex and contradictory nostalgic relationship with the past. We follow this with a consideration of how lofi hip hop’s mediation and reception reflects and expresses its listeners’ and producers’ ambivalent relationship with the material socioeconomic conditions of post-Fordist late capitalism. We theorize that lofi hip hop produces its meaning for listeners, at least in part, through a series of seemingly mutually exclusive, contradictory paradoxes: it relies aesthetically upon an elaborated form of what Svetlana Boym (2002: 49) refers to as “reflective nostalgia”, which engages both with hyper-specific memories of popular media which may have been consumed during, or at least associated with, a listener’s childhood, and, simultaneously, with a vague, abstract longing for a past which the listener is fully aware never existed; its impossibility is accepted, even cherished, and is valued in its own right. It also speaks of an equally paradoxical compliance with, and resistance against, the large corporate structures of contemporary social media, and the erosion of boundaries between work and leisure characteristic of late capitalism. Our participant-observation activities in the comments sections and live chat of several lofi hip hop channels, in particular the live chat for “lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to”, left us with the impression that many of the genre’s most enthusiastic participants are current school or university students, who may be using the music simultaneously for its stated functional purposes of productivity and relaxation, for the emotional exploration which both its often supportive and caring social structures, and its complex use of nostalgia, facilitate. Born and Haworth’s (2017) work on internet music identifies www.iaspmjournal.net 42 Emma Winston and Laurence Saywood what we believe to be a series of predecessors of this genre, but in contrast to these earlier genres, lofi hip hop eschews many of the tendencies which scholars have previously identified within “internet-born” music; we suggest that this might call into question the often cynical narratives applied to these musics, and provide an alternative lens through which to view online musical participation. We ultimately conclude that the contradictions which characterize lofi hip hop might be expressive of a particular contemporary mindset; lofi hip hop’s student participants are among the first generation too young to remember a time before what Jonathan Crary (2014: 8) refers to as “the paradoxes of the expanding, non-stop life-world of twenty-first-century capitalism…inseparable from shifting configurations of sleep and waking, illumination and darkness, justice and terror, and…exposure, unprotectedness, and vulnerability”. If twenty-first-century normality is characterized by “systemic impossibility” (ibid.: 127), then, perhaps, engaging with the impossible through popular culture is simply a way to make sense of everyday life. Defining lofi hip hop Since lofi hip hop appears to be unexamined in academic writing, we will first endeavor here to provide a brief description of its sound and historical lineage for unfamiliar readers. Lofi hip hop is almost exclusively instrumental; it rarely features rapping or emceeing and rarely features sung vocals. As a general rule, the only voices heard in lofi hip hop livestreams or playlists are occasional snippets of speech, frequently extracted from the soundtrack of films or television shows, which are most often positioned at the very beginning or end of a track to evoke a particular mood, and not repeated (Alemoru, 2018). Although the term “hip hop” is now conventionally associated with rapping over an instrumental, as Joseph G. Schloss (2014: 2) notes, the earliest hip hop took the form of live performances in which a DJ and a master of ceremonies took “relatively discrete” roles; the DJ played rhythmic parts of popular records on a turntable while the master of ceremonies communicated with the audience, encouraging them to dance. Schloss describes an evolution in complexity of these roles as hip hop made its way to recorded media, in which MCs’ speech became increasingly rhythmic and narrative-based, and DJs, later referred to as producers, began using technologies other than turntables in a studio context, eventually including digital sampling. Schloss’s emphasis is upon producers and the processes they use to “make beats”; although many work alongside rappers, others do not, and although lofi hip hop’s predominantly instrumental nature is a distinguishing feature of its style, its practices nonetheless represent a continuation of hip hop music production techniques more generally. The tempo of lofi hip hop tracks is usually relatively slow, between 70 and 85 BPM, by our own sampling. In terms of instrumentation, its sound tends to foreground acoustic or electroacoustic instruments; the instrument most frequently heard in the hours we spent engaging with ChilledCow was the acoustic piano (see “Yawn” by Jinsang and Two Sleepy, 2017). The electric piano, particularly the Fender Rhodes, also appears to be common (see “Sum loops” by Spliff Jacksun, 2017; “Sweaters are for introverts (instrumental)” by Aixion, 2018; “Waves” by Philanthrope, 2016), as does the guitar, which is usually either a nylon- stringed classical guitar or a hollow-bodied electric, often processed through a vibrato or chorus effect (see “Let me tell you about her” by Aimless, 2017; “Springtime Loop” by Kuranes, 2018; “I just wanna be happy” by Karson, 2018). Less common, but still occasionally heard instruments include the harp (see IASPM Journal vol.9 no.2 (2019) Beats to Relax/Study To: Contradiction and Paradox in Lofi Hip Hop 43 “Waking up at night to get some food.” by Sky.High, 2018), ukulele (see “I have love for everyone besides myself” by Barnes blvd, 2018), and samples of orchestral instruments, particularly string sections, are also sometimes heard (see “Riva []” by J^p^n, 2016; “Drwn” by Ramsey, 2017).
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